Introduction

Back in 2014, Paweł Swianiewicz lamented in a piece published in Local Government Studies that ‘most of the academic literature on local government treats Eastern Europe either as terra incognita, requiring exploratory investigation in the future, or puts the whole region into one basket described as “new local democracies”, coupled with accompanying stereotypes’ (Swianiewicz, 2014a: 292). Observed from the south-west corner of Europe, this grievance sounds eerily familiar. In my own experience with scholarly research on local government and politics, I have also encountered a fair share of broad stroke generalizations and stereotypes about the ‘Southern European’ model or the ‘new democracies’ of the 1970s when referring to Portugal, Spain and Greece.

The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, I review three major contributions to the study of territorial reforms present in the work of Paweł Swianiewicz. Most of his studies were developed in the context of local governments in Central and Eastern European post-communist countries, particularly Poland, but I argue that they have contributed to expanding the knowledge and study of territorial reforms in general. The second aim is to discuss how these contributions have enriched the study of territorial reforms in Western Europe and how they have broadened the scope of the field to encompass new research questions, theoretical approaches and country cases. In reflecting on these contributions, I will highlight the importance of time and space in advancing this research agenda on territorial reforms.

The chapter is divided into five sections. After this introduction, the following three sections review the contributions of Paweł Swianiewicz's writings in three major threads in the study of territorial reforms. Section two focuses on the importance of including inter-municipal cooperation initiatives as part of the discussion of territorial reforms. The third section stresses the combined study of amalgamation and de-amalgamation reforms as two sides of the same coin. Section four highlights the growing role of sub-municipal government units (SMUs) in urban governance. The final section discusses how these contributions have been useful in expanding comparative work and East-West dialogue on territorial reforms. Future research is likely to benefit from this broadened perspective as long as it takes time and space seriously.